Terrible Swift Sword (42 page)

McClellan and his devoted followers,
obviously, had gcjt themselves neck-deep in politics. They had a perfect right
tb do this, but it left them no room for complaint if the political pressures
became irksome; and it was bound to have a crippling effect on the army itself.
For the hot anti-slavery men-the Ben Wades, Zach Chandlers, and the rest, to
whom the gantlet was being thrown down—were precisely the men who had felt all
along that an officer's professional training and capacity mattered less than
his zeal for the cause. Knowing precisely how all of the political currents
were flowing, these men now could consider their old suspicions confirmed. The
anti-West Point faction and the anti-slavery faction were tending to become one
group; and at the same time the ardent Democrats were becoming pro-West Point,
and the inevitable rivalry between regulars and volunteers was becoming a
political rivalry as well. Benjamin Stark, one of Barlow's correspondents in
Washington, was telling Barlow that it was up to "us of the reasonable
party" to persuade the people that "war is a science which requires
time and means for its successful development."
¹⁰

Meanwhile the slavery issue continued to
assert itself. Mr. Lincoln was doing his best to keep it under control, but the
task was getting harder. It had been made acute this spring by the action of a
general named David Hunter, who commanded Federal troops along the south
Atlantic coast and who abruptly conceived it his duty to proclaim emancipation
in his domain. Without consulting Washington, General Hunter announced that
all slaves in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina were now free; and this
news reached Washington just when Mr. Lincoln was trying patiently, with scant
success, to persuade the border state leaders to accept gradual and compensated
emancipation. General Hunter's proclamation was, to be sure, an indication that
the institution was apt to be shattered forever by brute force if it were held
onto too tenaciously, but it was not the sort of thing that helped Mr. Lincoln's
negotiations. On May 19 the President announced that whatever Hunter's
proclamation might consist of it was null and void, and that no general anywhere
had been or would ever be authorized to end slavery by pronunciamento. He then
went on to turn his rebuke of Hunter into a direct appeal to slave-holders.

Congress,
he pointed out, had voted for compensated emancipation; would not the
slave-holding states go along with this, of their own free will? "I do not
argue," he wrote. "I beseech you to make the arguments for
yourselves. You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. I
beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be,
far above personal and partizan politics. This proposal makes common cause for
a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. It acts not the Pharisee. The
change it contemplates would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending nor
wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it?"
¹¹

The
signs of the time were not everywhere visible: the signs of the terrible times
of the spring of 1862, which said clearly that slavery was dying and that the
only question for anybody was whether it should die quietly, in bed, with
mourners tearfully consenting, or by unmitigated violence on the field of
battle. McClellan read Mr. Lincoln's proclamation, and wrote to his wife:
"I am very glad that the Presdt had come out as he did about Hunter's
order—I feared he would not have the moral courage to do so."
¹²

It
may have taken moral courage to rescind General Hunter's proclamation: what
General McClellan could not see—could not, in his most thoughtful moments, get
so much as a glimmering of—was that it also took moral courage for
a
President
beset by the strongest men in his own party to sustain a general who clearly,
and to every politician's knowledge, was the active favorite of the strongest
men in the opposition party. McClellan could see only that the administration
was reducing his status, taking away parts of his army and listening too
attentively to politicians whose ideas were unlike the ideas of the politicians
to whom he himself was listening. He could understand neither Mr. Lincoln's
deep desire to win the war before it became the kind of war in which victory
itself might be indigestible, nor the fact that Mr. Lincoln was under an
irresistible compulsion, which no general could lighten, to insist upon the
absolute safety of the city of Washington. And it was everybody's hard luck
that these two points were of dominant importance during the campaign on the
Virginia peninsula.

The
time element had always been a sore point. McClellan had been given the supreme
command largely because the administration wanted quick and decisive action,
and he had lost it because he seemed too cautious; he could not move until
everything was ready, until every possible mischance had been discounted in
advance. But the same administration that wanted him to be swift and daring was
itself the very soul of niggling caution as far as the capital was concerned.
Risking everything with one hand, it would with the other risk nothing
whatever; and the things that took place that spring make no sort of sense
unless the reason for this extreme conservatism is understood.

The security of the national capital meant
more than anything else. The Federal government was not fighting a foreign
war, in which temporary loss of the capital could be atoned for later; it was
fighting to prove that it could maintain its,' own political integrity, and
loss of the capital city would be taken as the unmistakable sign that it had
failed. The sign would be read abroad as quickly as at home. It would almost
certainly lead Britain and France to recognize the Confederacy, and recognition
was likely to end everything. So here was
a
point
on which President Lincoln would take no chances at all. He had to be
certain
that Washington was safe, and he could take
no general's word for it—unless that general had won the last ounce of his
unreserved confidence, which no living general had yet done.